Denmark: Immigrants moving their children to Danish-majority schools

Denmark: Immigrants moving their children to Danish-majority schools

Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten reports that immigrant families are moving their children away from schools which have many bilingual children and to places where Danes are in the majority.

According to the Kolding municipality, 39% of the city's immigrant children will start the school year in a school outside their own district. This is three times as many as by Danish children and an increase from last year's 34%.

This article was prepared by the Islam in Europe blog - islamineurope.blogspot.com


Ib Hansen, the city's children and education director says he's happy that the bilinguals are spreading themselves out voluntarily.

In contrast, in Aarhus, bilingual students who do poorly on the language test, are bused from, for example, Gellerup park to the city's Dane-dominated wealthy areas.

In Esbjerg, Odense, Copenhagen and Aalborg immigrant parents move their children away from school witha high ratio of bilinguals.

Klaus Majgaard of the Odense municipality says that they're probably not that different all other parents who also want their children to go to a good, mixed school.

School registration to the Tornhøj school in Aalborg, which has many bilingual students, shows that just half of the district's potential kindergarten students chose the local school.

Several people point out that it's the children from the resource-rich immigrant families who are spreading themselves voluntarily. This means some schools might be further marginalizes, because they've already lost the Danish students and now they'll lose the children from the most well-functioning immigrant families.

Ikram Sarwar (S), deputy chairman of the integration committee in Copenhagen says that now all the parents have the resources to freely choose their school and what is best for the child's education, and that the schools risk losing the resource-strong children.


Source: JP (Danish)

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